Regional commercial trucks posted the largest gains in both trip volume and mileage from Q4 2025 through Q2 2026, while long-haul managed only slight growth — and existing fleets absorbed the extra demand without adding trucks. That is the central finding of Geotab's inaugural Health of U.S. Supply Chain report, built on activity data from more than 6 million commercial vehicles across five vocations: long-haul, regional, hub-and-spoke, last-mile and drayage.

Geotab's data set represents about 12% of all U.S. commercial traffic flowing through its platform, according to Mike Branch, the company's vice president of data and analytics. "It's completely unbiased. We're not issuing a survey asking people's opinion on things. This is based purely on the physical movement of trucks across the globe," Branch told media on a call. "They're early signals of what's happening on the ground based on these movement patterns."

Branch said the goal is to deliver a read on the freight economy faster than traditional financial data, which can take multiple quarters and up to a year to turn around.

What does the data cover?

The report analyzed quarterly commercial vehicle activity along the core U.S. interstate corridors I-10, I-35, I-80/90 and I-95, including:

• More than 1.2 million long-haul journeys
• Roughly 1 million regional trips
• About 230,000 hub-and-spoke trips
• More than 50 million door-to-door delivery trips across Los Angeles, Denver, New York and Atlanta
• Approximately 254,000 port entries at Los Angeles/Long Beach and New York/New Jersey

How did each vocation perform?

Median mileage for long-haul journeys crept up from 456.6 miles in Q4 2025 to 462 in Q2 2026, while utilization — a measure of active workdays — held near 73% across the period. Branch pointed to that stability as evidence of a steady long-haul ecosystem.

Regional activity ran hotter. Median travel distance rose consistently from 100.3 to 102 miles over the three quarters, trip count grew 3.8%, and utilization stayed around 74%. Steady utilization combined with more trips and longer distances means existing trucks met rising demand by stretching routes and workdays rather than operators adding capacity.

Branch said regional outpacing long-haul "signaled a shift of inventory very likely closer to those end markets, so closer to warehousers, closer to retailers, closer to consumers to meet demand and faster delivery."

Hub-and-spoke showed the sharpest efficiency gain. Utilization jumped from 80.3% in Q4 2025 to 84.3% in Q2 2026, while median mileage per journey slipped slightly and trip volume fluctuated. The report said fleets extracted more from existing assets, and any further demand would likely require added capacity.

What happened in last-mile and at the ports?

Geotab cautioned against broad conclusions on last-mile because each city behaves differently, but all four metros posted growth in trip volume — all but New York in double digits — alongside a decrease in miles per trip.

"It reads as a productivity story, especially one that matters right now with ongoing driver shortages. People are trying to increase the number of deliveries and the proportional cost there," Branch said. "It seemed like, from a routing and optimization perspective, fleets are getting smarter about some of their strategy and how they're optimizing the delivery within the cities."

At the ports, Geotab cross-checked truck movements against port authority data. Branch flagged a dip in West Coast trip volume even as the port reported a 12% increase in June — a divergence he attributed to rail absorbing the growth, meaning added cargo did not generate an equivalent rise in truck moves.

Why does stability without capacity growth matter?

"Redistribution is what drove stability while freight activity and capacity diverged at several points. Either capacity held flat or shrank while activity grew, or vehicle utilization rose while actual trip volume didn't," the report said. "These signals argue for a resilient supply chain responding to growing demand with smarter optimization instead of added capacity."

For shippers and carriers, the implication is that the system absorbed incremental demand through denser use of existing trucks rather than new equipment — a pattern that holds until utilization ceilings, already visible in hub-and-spoke, force capacity decisions.

Geotab plans to publish the report on a regular cadence with greater detail in future editions, Branch said, "because this environment is changing very quickly, and we think that these insights can certainly be helpful to the broader economy."